Writer-director Aaron Rookus’ film De Idylle (Dutch for Idyllic) presents an interconnected menagerie of death-haunted people — like all of us, they fear death, crave it, avoid it, and are forced to confront it even when preoccupied and unprepared. Rookus is serious about his existential subject matter, but carries it off lightly, with a precarious tonal balance of mordancy and warmth dominating the film. To his credit, he gamely delves into a topic uncomfortable for many using an unconventional narrative structure, while still applying an audience-friendly sense of humor throughout. The film’s intersecting narrative threads, though, are never balanced effectively, and an unexpected venture away from the film’s base reality into alternate-universe fantasy causes disorientation and distraction rather than shedding light on the film’s conflicts.
De Idylle introduces its central characters through a series of seemingly-disconnected scenes that crystallize their current quandaries. Annika (Hadewych Minis) is an opera diva who receives a terminal cancer diagnosis, which she struggles to disclose to her loved ones; Victor (Eelco Smits) is a recently-out gay man dating for the first time after divorcing his wife of 10 years; Joke (Beppie Melissen) is a bitter elderly woman who wants only to die. Incrementally, the film reveals that these three are related: Annika and Victor are sister and brother; Joke is their grandmother. A separate thread concerns Musa (Nabil Mallat), a nihilistic high school teacher contemplating suicide, Timo (Isacco Limper), his young son who is convinced he’ll die in a week, and Hannah, Musa’s dissatisfied wife — who is also played by Hadewych Minis.
Rookus treats these character’s narratives with care and interest in their individual personalities and conflicts, and he directs a solid ensemble cast, each of whom turn in sensitive and smart performances. Yet it gradually becomes clear that Annika and Victor are the most essential, narratively speaking, and the focus on them clarifies Rookus’ central insight about death: the middle-aged siblings, one of whom is facing death herself and the other who must deal with the imminent death of numerous family members, must learn to accept the simultaneous inevitability and unpredictability of death in order to see clearly the lives they want to live. The other characters are comparably underdeveloped because of this consolidation of narrative focus, however, leading the film to drift when neither are on screen — although Melissen still manages to deliver a blistering performance as a hardened matriarch; she simultaneously grips and startles in her limited screen time.
The subplots relating to Hannah and her family are a curious case. Rookus does not take any meaningful steps to physically distinguish Hannah from Annika, and Minis likewise does not make any readily apparent choices in performance that would distinguish the two. The characters, then, have no clear boundary at the film’s outset, suggesting that Rookus intended to create ambiguity as to whether the characters are separate or the same (in full transparency, this writer did not realize the characters were meant to be two distinct people for much of the film’s duration). The truth of the relationship between these identical women is incrementally revealed when Annika, who has been noticing Hannah in public places, finally sees her face, and later confesses to Victor that she feels like she personally knows her doppelgänger. Hannah also confesses to a clandestine date that she dreamed of being an opera star as a child, but pursued a career in human resources instead, making apparent that Hannah is a mirror-universe version of Annika had she chosen a different path in life. Confusion remains nonetheless: is Hannah an actual person whose life has coincidental parallels to Annika’s, or is she solely a product of Annika’s imagination? If the latter is true, then what to make of Musa and Timo, who have individual plotlines separate from Hannah’s? This jump into the speculative, akin to Lynchian doubling, is not supported by the film’s baseline genre of realistic dramedy. Rookus does not prime the audience to experience this drift into the speculative, and thus creates more narrative confusion than thematic illumination.
De Idylle’s multivalent ambitions ultimately prevent it from coalescing into a fully effective work — its large cast of characters feed into a narrative that is scattered at times, and the mishandled subplot surrounding Hannah damages the film’s overall coherence. Its more successful components lie in Rookus’ achievement of a delicate tonal blend of earnest emotion and ironic humor, and his consistent insights into how anxiety around death permeates lives and relationships. Ultimately then, while uneven on the whole, De Idylle at least proves refreshing in its unsentimental humanism and emotional honesty.
Published as part of IFFR 2025 — Dispatch 3.
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